Plan Four: Courageous Fearናሙና

COURAGEOUS FEAR…ESTABLISHED DANIEL’S AMBASSADORSHIP

The year was 605 BC. The prophet Daniel, a young teenager, had every reason to be angry with God. Everything had gone wrong. His home country of Israel was destroyed. The nation’s temple had been ransacked and burned. He was separated from his family by a thousand miles of hot Arabian desert. He was forced to live in a strange land with a strange language, surrounded by weird, evil gods. He had been enrolled in a boarding school, “Babylon University,” and asked to eat what he considered horrible forbidden food.

Yet, Daniel did not blame God. He did not see himself as a victim. We know this from his book: “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand.” Daniel doesn’t say, “Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem.” In three short words, we understand the heart of Daniel, for he writes, “...the Lord delivered Jehoiakim, king of Judah into his hand.” From the opening paragraph in the book of Daniel, we understand that Daniel yielded himself to the sovereignty of God because he had a deep and abiding reverence and proper fear of God.

It was Daniel’s courageous fear that gave him the bravery to stand in front of King Nebuchadnezzar and tell him that unless he repented, the Most High God was going to drive him insane for seven years, and he would eat grass like a wild animal.

His courageous fear compelled Daniel to disobey King Darius’ edict and continue to pray three times a day to the God of Israel, which resulted in being tossed into the lions’ den only to be rescued by the angel of God.

Toward the end of his life, after many decades of public service, it was his courageous fear that gave Daniel the nerve to stand in front of King Belshazzar and all the nobles of his kingdom, reject the king’s manipulative gifts, read the mysterious handwriting on the wall, and tell the king that because of his evil deeds, “he had been weighed in the balances of God and found wanting” and that the Most High God had taken away his kingdom and given it to the Medes and the Persians.